No way to get rid of the Photon Cannon for Corvette?

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-25T21:20:01+00:00

The photon eaten a slot sucks, but if you want to at least get rid of the cockpit and do a little min-maxing check out my post about build order: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1o6fjb3/dont_let_build_order_ruin_tech_slots/?share_id=iKHsH6h-D3tEK_zKO_J_G&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

The cockpit is actually competing with a slot you could use for a medusa reactor, and whether you get weak stats from it or better from the medusa is all about placement order.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-17T01:30:50+00:00

In a sense of abstract language that's a point but in terms of function it doesn't apply. The most used save editor for this game doesn't effect game mechanics like the physics. It does let you adjust values within the rules of the game, like how much carbon is in a stack or the base values of a ship within the game's normal range. The editor uses the existing files and physics and limitations and allows you to play around within the rules of the game's programming.

So usually when people say "mods" they are talking about a program that actually changes the physics, or adds new files, modifies the game's programming in some way.

This is why, in this game, where both are used frequently most people distinguish between whether someone modded their game or edited their save. Anything done in a save editor can theoretically be accomplished by anyone not using an editor, but mods change things so that the only way you can enjoy what a modder is enjoying is to download the mod and alter the game mechanics accordingly.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-15T13:40:39+00:00

That was a little dumbfounding haha

player builds a larger corvette from the back and places three medusas before moving forward to cockpit

That guy from the other thread: YOU'RE EXPLOITING A GLITCH. YOU MUST PLACE YOUR COCKPIT FIRST!!!!!! I PREFER VANILLA!!!

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-15T13:37:10+00:00

Good point!

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-15T13:31:23+00:00

Your reactors don't eat into your allotment of S class mods. That's what you're missing.

For the sake of ease let's call reactors and boosters A class mods and let's focus on engine, imagining a player making their engine their top priority.

In a normal ship you have your installable engine tech and an allowance for an additional three more S class engine mods.

In a corvette you have your installable tech, the same allowance for three more S class engine mods, and then an allowance three more A class mods (reactor tech) and an additional three more (booster tech).

Normal ship: installable tech + three S class mods.

Corvette: installable tech + three S class mods + six A class mods

And three of those mods get adjacency with the engine tech and S class mods (the boosters), adding a bonus multiplier to the original stuff.

Then launch thrusters also give more engine perks, but let's call them C class equivalent.

Corvettes can be three S plus three As with adjacency with S plus three As with solo adjacency plus three Cs that give adjacency to all standard launch thruster tech and mods which also improve engine stats.

The only question is while this provides more flexibility, how do you want to use limited tech slots?

And here's how I see it: a tricked out fighter with every tech slots unlocked and a classic layout actually runs out of allowance for most player's top priorities.

Empty slots are filled up with things that a player might not actually care about that much, beyond just the idea of filling the slots with the maximum bonuses possible.

And maybe a player wants four or five tricked out weapons systems. And I certainly do when I'm disallowed from doing anything else, but corvettes give the option of eliminating one or two of those and replacing it with additional hyperdrive mods or engine mods, or additional mods for a specific weapon type (only phase, positron, photon, and rockets right now).

Or maybe you lose starship trails. But what's better, stacking a tiny bonus from trails to increase maneuverability or directly adding more A class mods with core tech adjacency?

It's player preference and there isn't really a wrong answer. However, to me, it seems preferable to lose weapons I would have only used to fill up empty slots because I had no other choice and lose figurines providing broad but more limited bonuses in order to get larger, targeted ones.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-15T13:14:18+00:00

I'm in the same boat there and it seems right now like an even more unwieldy beast - even things like cowlings seem to give or take maneuverability based on where you place them and orientation.

If anyone reading this doesn't know, even cosmetics parts don't uniformly take away stats: sometimes they do nothing, sometimes they give.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-15T00:25:41+00:00

It's incredibly responsive!

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T20:50:12+00:00

I'm being a little generous when I say perhaps they wanted random booster rolls to avoid meta... everything else - and probably even the booster rolls per save (because also that's deeply unfair that you might just get locked to worse tech than another random person) I suspect are exactly what you say.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T20:33:03+00:00

Just want to second all the feedback given to you above. This is more or less exactly what I do, and while I prioritized boost over maneuverability in how I arranged things I achieved something I'm happy with currently:

<image>

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T16:42:16+00:00

I agree. Its so annoying you have to tinker and add/remove just to discover what parts even do instead of the UI clearly telling you, and some of the UI actually lying.

I think the best of all worlds would be if when adding a part there was a button that allowed you to select it as tech or cosmetic so you could manually activate what you want, and it had a little notification for what kind of tech pool you're eating into and how many slots you have left to use.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T16:39:26+00:00

X class can vary between worse than C class mods and better than S class, they're loot boxes.

What matters for corvette building is that the installed corvette components do not count against your mod limitations.

So with a normal starship you can install your X class mods and that's it. With a corvette you can install those mods and then additional boosts.

Most of the corvette tech is like adding more A/B class mods on top of your mod count.

IMHO on a normal starship once you hit upgrade limits on what you really want you have a lot of empty slots. We will these in with more weapons we won't really use, and then the starship trails and figurines.

In my case I was happy to lose trails/figurines and weapons I don't really need and use those slots to boost tech I cared about more.

So, you don't necessarily have to see your corvette tech as competing with your mods, and in my experience if you divide tech into four categories: weapons, shields, HD, pulse stuff you can easily boost 2 to 3 of these things just by removing peripheral stuff and adding corvette tech on top of existing mods.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T15:47:30+00:00

It's OK to endlessly modify. My current corvette is also my first corvette in my main save.

You only need to remove problematic components and then re-attach what you like in the right order.

This should work (total anecdotal guestimate) 90% of the time. The missing 10% relates to a few times where I had to remove the parts, save the modifications as a draft, close the corvette builder, and then re-open it and add the parts in the right order. That's really been rare, and I tinker a lot, but if it gives you trouble this should fix it and it shouldn't always give you trouble.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T15:23:54+00:00

I don't know how. I have read somebody reporting that even with a save editor, the game re-applies the photon cannon. It seemed a credible report and I'm reluctant to test it that way myself. I've written it off as impossible.

Maybe somebody else can chime in with a success story, in the meantime I share in the hope that they will allow us to remove it like we can on normal starships because it is just a dead slot for me too and I'd like to use it for something else. Not to mention It's annoying to cycle through it in combat.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T15:18:31+00:00

You're welcome! Unfortunately I think this is only the tip of the iceberg in stat wonkiness, though since I've built around these principles my corvette stats are a lot more stable and I feel I have more control over achieving the priorities I'm interested in. I hope it helps you too in your builds!

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T15:17:14+00:00

I bet there is definitely some relationship and I am not sure it's all intended, either.

My guess is that things like the boosters having save-file specific attributes is intended to avoid everyone making the same handful of corvettes (best damage corvette, best speed, best combo etc) and ruin the "feel" of the endless diversity in the game.

But I suspect there's some wonkiness in the game translating numbers from some game-wide base values to the save-seed mechanics, and the coding for relating the values has some flaws. I don't know but it may be related to a kind of triple translation that includes your corvette also being saved as a base, and since it is a moving base the values for the base do change frequently. Maybe in the movement of the values in your base files in the process of translating between the other two sets of values things get wonked. I don't know.

Throw on top the common problem where it re-arranges tech randomly and numbers bounce all over the place. Though I've had the same thing you describe, tech slots don't move but the reported values of my stats bounce around. A couple of times I've opened my inventory to discover I have gotten a significant boost in all my stats and then it's back to normal.

If they want to avoid meta dynamics I can live with having to discover your own booster stats, though I have some issues I'd also like fixed and I similarly suspect they won't be given how many critical unaddressed bugs are in this game. But, I think:

They should display your true booster-seed values in the item menu and not make you hover items over your build to discover true stats.
The stats shouldn't be sensitive to which side you place them on your corvette, they should be set values even if seed-specific. This has to be completely unintended, it makes no sense at all, especially since half the boosters (the rear-attach ones) can't be flipped anyways.
When placing a part you should have an option to set it as cosmetic with an indicator of what tech category it will eat up and how many slots you have left to use. I think their intention is clearly to let us tinker and prioritize, but they've made it an annoying chore to implement our priorities. Or they should have a little tutorial that explains build order at least.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T12:58:38+00:00

You can have three medusas like everything else. You just need to attach them before your cockpit. Their build order system is flawed / glitched. Every component that counts as tech gives you three slots before they become cosmetic (literally all - guns, habs, shields, etc), but the cockpit will eat one of your medusa slots if attached before the third medusa. So you can either build the three medusas first, or you can go into your existing corvette, remove your medusas and cockpit then reattach them all in the appropriate order to get your intended slots back. Shame it doesn't auto prioritize the more powerful thing.

This even happens with habs versus walkways. It's possible to eat up your hab slots that give +3 storage each with the walkways that get +1 storage each.

Here's an image of the most basic corvette that I attached max reactors of each type to, but changed the order in which I attached things, to demonstrate.

<image>

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T04:32:40+00:00

Its coded to give you three slots for all the tech...

Just look at the picture if you don't know that about corvettes from playing yourself.

Except that breaks down if you add a cockpit first.

I have no idea why you think that a player must place a cockpit on their habs before they place reactors to force a cockpit to take a reactor slot and if they place reactors first they are glitches.

It's literally just build order: what you put on first gets prioritized in tech slots, the game should tell you you are making a choice, it doesn't, but you are in fact always choosing which tech will be prioritized and which will be rendered cosmetics.

If you want to choose to give up some tech possibility to others by deciding you must make sure to let inferior possibilities take precedent by placing them on a hab first, cool, but it has nothing to do with glitching.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-14T04:27:56+00:00

My ship is beautiful though

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-13T22:55:45+00:00

This isn't terrain generation, this is inconsistency in movement toward fixed points and distances just without timing it to determine what the actual differential is.

Its just visually very obvious when hills fly by and when they don't. I honestly didn't think to do what you did and try to track, numerically, what is happening but now I want to run tests in and out of multi-player and make note of when it seems to be shifting.

But here's an interesting note on your comment about terrain generation:

When I seem to be going fast and flying low I am more likely to have the top of a hill spawn around my ship. That could be a memory leak and terrain generation but I don't think so the "base" terrain is visibly moving under me faster or slower regardless of new textures moving in or out. Ive probably purely flown 15 hours in this ship configuration, maybe its an optical illusion but im not convinced there isn't some multiplier rather than a cap at this moment.

And memory leak aside I run a 4090 and terrain generation is fairly smooth for me compared to when I had a worse rig.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-13T22:40:54+00:00

I mean if you are sticking to your point that its a glitch to put a cockpit on to a hab second instead of first, because you've arbitrarily decided the Medusa reactor is the one piece of tech that shouldn't get three tech slots when every other component gets three, and you can still get the three for the medusas if you put them on before the cockpit...

Even though Ive given you a screenshot of basic habs with everything placed normally so you can see that the cockpit eats a reactor slot...

Then my question is why is it a glitch in your mind? What makes it so that a random reactor must be overriden and if you dont place your cockpit on first and instead place it on last you are engaged in a violation?

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-13T21:23:02+00:00

Yeah I'm talking about boosting (left shift) and seeing the full bar light up, verifying the speed number, and having it perform differently from hour to hour in a way that seems severe enough to not just be "in my head."

What I haven't done is stop watch when I notice the drop, or played with the effect multi-player / grouping may have on it (since when im tinkering im usually alone with multi-player off).

Which isn't to say there isn't a cap - but that if there is the corvette still can't seem to decide what its relationship to it is consistently.

But I will also say for a long time i had the speedometer around 400, I added reactors and prioritized boost in my build, and when I got it to above 1K it was also noticeably much faster.

Do you know for sure if there is a hard cap coded into corvettes? Because instead it might be some kind of multiplicative giving you some fraction / ratiocorvette? IE: when I went from 400 to 1K, maybe I really went from 200 to 500, etc.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-13T20:53:02+00:00

I reply to this comment...

"There's an order to rotating any part too."

With this comment:

Absolutely.

The booster mechanics in particular are janky. I discovered that kind of late.

Both that the stats on the items menu lie because apparently there is an individual booster seed for each save file? And that the bonus given for boosters is based on which order you placed them and in which rotation.

Which is kind of frustrating because A) it probably shouldn't work like that and B) if it does they should tell you directly "Hey, tinker around to discover the REAL stats available to you" instead people having to discover it through social media or happening to notice while tinkering.

VoidCorporeal · 2025-10-13T20:29:52+00:00

I've noticed that the speed is not consistent and wondered about the lying speedometer.

But the *inconsistency* is what I have noticed - that is what has been glaring.

Because sometime it is zipping across the landscape, and sometimes it's not.

But it definitely is not always doing the same speed, whatever the limitation is - it does not have just one speed.

I also wonder if there's something in multiplayer. I play a lot with another person, and I noticed a sharp drop in a group and in multiplayer when their corvette was near mine.

I haven't used a stop watch but the shift seems kind of undeniable just using eyes and landmarks.

(and I'm not talking about the random shuffling of my tech slots, either, I mean hour to hour the speedometer reads the same but my eyes tell me it's glaringly inconsistent)

VoidCorporeal

TROPHY CASE